The demands of my current job have helped assure I have only peripheral involvement in NPR’s 2012 presidential coverage. That’s really odd for me, since I spent most of the last 27 years immersed in political journalism.

I’ve written so many Election Night overview stories, for example, that I built a process to make them easier to do. I typically write a timeline of the night in advance — when polls are closing in various states, what the expected outcome is, where things are likely to stand at a given time and so on — slap it up on a wall or easel and then follow it through the night. I then station a copy editor next to me and write the story in real time. By the 2008 presidential election, I had this down to such a science that I clubbed most of my competitors in terms of speed and focus. The story wound up in a journalism textbook:
USAToday.com Election Night 2008

But not everything I did was about the news of the moment. For example, I had tremendous fun updating this USA Today map for several months in 2004:

In 2000, when I was senior editor of politics for CNN.com, I performed so many divergent tasks that it’s hard to spotlight just one. And course, 2000 was the year of Bush v. Gore, which turned Election Night into an experience straight out of Kafka. A lot of this stuff is hidden away now, but here’s a grab from the GOP convention via the Internet Wayback Machine.

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